of a sad-iron upon the padded
ironing-board.

"Ma!"

Mrs. Ericson's whitey-yellow hair, pale eyes, and small nervous
features were shadowed behind the cotton fly-screen.

"Vell?" she said.

"I haven't got noth-ing to do-o."

"Go pile the vood."

"I piled piles of it."

"Then you can go and play."

"I _been_ playing."

"Then play some more."

"I ain't got nobody to play with."

"Then find somebody. But don't you step vun step out of this yard."

"I don't see _why_ I can't go outa the yard!"

"Because I said so."

Again the sound of the sad-iron.

Carl invented a game in which he was to run in circles, but not step
on the grass; he made the tenth inspection that day of the drying
hazelnuts whose husks were turning to seal-brown on the woodshed roof;
he hunted for a good new bottle to throw at Irving Lamb's barn; he
mended his sling-shot; he perched on a sawbuck and watched the street.
Nothing passed, nothing made an interesting rattling, except one
democrat wagon.

From over the water another gun-shot murmured of distant hazards.

Carl jumped down from the sawbuck and marched deliberately out of the
yard, along Oak Street toward The Hill, the smart section of
Joralemon, where live in exclusive state five large houses that get
painted nearly every year.

"I'm gonna seek-my-fortune. I'm gonna find Bennie and go swimming," he
vowed. Calmly as Napoleon defying his marshals, General Carl
disregarded the sordid facts that it was too late in the year to go
swimming, and that Benjamin Franklin Rusk couldn't swim, anyway. He
clumped along, planting his feet with spats of dust, very dignified
and melancholy but, like all small boys, occasionally going mad and
running in chase of nothing at all till he found it.

He stopped before the House with Mysterious Shutters.

Carl had never made b'lieve fairies or princes; rather, he was in the
secret world of boyhood a soldier, a trapper, or a swing-brakeman on
the M. & D. R.R. But he was bespelled by the suggestion of grandeur in
the iron fence and gracious trees and dark carriage-shed of the House
with Shutters. It was a large, square, solid brick structure, set
among oaks and sinister pines, once the home, or perhaps the mansion,
of Banker Whiteley, but unoccupied for years. Leaves rotted before the
deserted carriage-shed. The disregarded steps in front were seamed
with shallow pools of water for days after a rain. The windows had
always been darkened, but n